LukasRos' Blog

Web Montag Frankfurt Meeting #38

On Monday, I made a trip to Frankfurt in order to visit the Web Montag Meeting Frankfurt #38 (web monday) at the Brotfabrik. I have attended this event a couple of times starting back in 2006, but I haven’t been there for more than a year.

It was great to feel the vibe of the geek crowd at such an event and overhearing people talk about hashtags and checking in with Foursquare. That alone was worth it, since I haven’t been at any similar event lately.

At 19:30, Ali-Pasha Foroughi, one of the organizers, took the stage, thanked the sponsors and welcomed the first presenter. Every time he spoke, Ali put a lot of emphasis on the local nature of the event, reassuring everybody in the audience that there are things going on in the Rhein Main area, not just Berlin and Silicon Valley (“Rhein Main rules!”).

There were four talks on this evening: 

1. Surviving re:publica - report from the “school trip”: Jan Eggers a.k.a. @untergeekDE (who is doing social media for the public broadcaster hr) told about his experience attending the re:publica conference in Berlin. He said journalists are trying to grasp this event and describe it with one headline which is not (or no longer) possible. Thus, he didn’t try it and rather told only a few highlights and anecdotes. Aforementioned journalists also keep on using the term “Netzgemeinde” (net society), which is totally inadequate to use since there is no working network at the conference … . His highlights were @RegSprecher (representative of German government), scientific analysis of personalities in comment threads (trolls, anyone?!) and the poll for the worst web video. What I personally found interesting is that Twitter was the biggest corporate player at this “blogger conference” and the company was placing a lot of emphasis on being “the second screen”, probably in an attempt to find a distinctive feature over Facebook.
2. The Cloud - you’re deeper in than you think: René Büst, a technology analyst for clouduser.de, told the audience that everyone is in the cloud. Then he proceeded with an explanation of cloud computing, describing terms such as public vs. private cloud, IaaS vs. PaaS etc.. The presentation was focused on the fundamental basics, maybe too high level for the attending crowd?! I had the impression the people around me already knew what they were told. One interesting remark, though, was about the cloud challenging corporate IT departments, which often cannot act fast enough and so other departments bypass them and purchase resources directly from external cloud vendors. At the end of the talk, the CloudCamp Frankfurt was announced. I’m curious how this partly barcamp-style event will turn out and how they broad topic cloud computing will be packed into one day.
3. Designtage Wiesbaden: Did you know that the small town of Wiesbaden has over 600 design agency?! I didn’t. Those agencies celebrate themselves and connect with local SMBs at the annual design days. This was the second report from another event on this evening, but it was presented in a quite different style. The speaker, Tina Rötter, is a print designer, but was qualified for speaking at a geek event by her dog (who also took the stage with her) having his own Twitter account …
4. Oli.TV - an online concert portal: This talk was different from the others because it was a startup pitch. Still it was maybe the best and most engaging talk of the evening, thanks to the passionate and very likable founder Sebastian Knoll who really knew how to pitch his idea of streaming concerts online. They’ve already signed major artists (such as Alicia Keys and 50 Cent - “my brother is the tour organizer for 50 Cent”) and they have a clear business model in terms of pricing and marketing. However they are still at the start of building the product and looking for developers, on both this evening and at Startup Weekend (which was also announced at the event). What I’m wondering is why I missed this company at the code_n CeBIT booth …

All in all, the talks were not mindblowing but nevertheless interesting. I’m planning to go next month as well, since it’s a great way to feel as part of the “Netzgemeinde” :-) I hope I’ll find more networking opportunities then as well.

In case anybody wants to attend the other events which I’ve mentioned: When signing up for Startup Weekend, the code webmonday gives you 25% off.

Google+ vs. Facebook

Is Google+ doomed to failure or will it be a Facebook killer? These are the observations from an active user of both social networks:

Nerds vs. Non-Nerds / Men vs. Women

If I compare my Google+ circles with my Facebook friends however, there is a striking difference: Most of my college friends from computer science and IT colleagues are on Google+. And many of them have have abandoned or even deleted their Facebook account, or they had none in the first place. On the other hand, none of my family and few others are on Google+. I have only two women in my circles and none of them are active. My Facebook friends, on the other side, contain a broad range of different people and gender is balanced. Interesting. Let’s see whether we can find a cause for this observation!

Circling vs. Friending

Facebook friendships are always mutual, confirmed by both sides. Managing lists etc. to group one’s friends is optional, a featured tucked on and rarely used by the majority. When adding a person on Google+, though, I have to decide which circles to put them in and circling is a one-way connection, with no obligation for the other person to follow me back. This does not only make it easier to connect with strangers due to the lightweight, less binding nature of circling, it is also an important psychological difference. My theory is that especially girls may find one-way relationships creepy and “stalkerish” and even if they search for an entourage, this is no replacement for the mutually-verified friendship. Geeks (both male and female) may be attracted by the idea of grouping relationships into circles. Men in general will see the opportunities for networking (Psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister has a talk worth reading called “Is there anything good about men?” that explores differences between men and women without judgement and he basically says something similar).

Quality vs. Quantity

Google’s Vic Gundotra says a write access to Google+ for external applications is “not coming anytime soon” as he’s afraid of “polluting” the stream. So far, Google+ is no secondary usage place, there’s only original content. This leads to less, but more meaningful content. A focus on quality. Facebook, on the other hand, has focussed on quantity with their launch of Timeline and Open Graph. Even if I’m not visiting Facebook for days, my timeline will fill itself with music from spotify, foursquare checkins, Tumblr postings or even just content generated about me by other users through “frictionless sharing”. This way, they achieve a true ambient intimacy for some, while others will just go “meh I’m not interested what my friends eat for breakfast”.

Professional vs. Personal

I think Google+ looks like the typical Google product: A clean, well-thought interface but not as creative and simple as many others. And to me it looks much more professional, but not in a LinkedIn-this-is-my-CV-kinda way. It looks like a place for conversations with peers, both known and unknown, and many early users said that it’s much better than Facebook for this purpose; also because the stream is really focussed on original content and no secondary usage. Google+ has games but they made sure they’re separated from the main feed of updates. Users who have been bombarded by FarmVille, CityVille and “WhateverVille” requests in Facebook may sigh in relief when using Google+. 

Conclusion

Being able to write a long blog post about the differences of Facebook and Google+ proves the fact that one is not merely a clone of the other (and I haven’t even written about the largest unique feature of Google+, the Hangouts). They seem to serve different needs for different people. Some need one, some the other, and social media pros will use both, propably with a third party aggregation tool. Maybe Google and Facebook, while obviously being competitors in this space, will hurt themselves more when trying to copy the other instead of focussing what they can do best.

What do you think?!